Note 330 — Chapter X

"In one of these embargoed ships had actually embarked for their voyage across the Atlantic two no less considerable personages than John Hampden and his kinsman, Oliver Cromwell."—Life of Hampden, by Lord Nugent, vol. i., p. 254. London, 1832.

Lord Nugent has fallen into the vulgar error, an invention, probably, of the Puritan historian, and unanswerably disproved by a reference to Parliamentary records. See Miss Aikin's Life of Charles I., vol. i., p. 472; Bancroft's History of the United States, vol. i., p. 411. The exultation of the Puritan writers on the subject is excessive. They ascribe all the subsequent misfortunes of Charles I. in connection with the scheme of Providence to this tyrannical edict, as they call it.—Russell's Modern Europe, vol. ii., p. 237. See Bancroft's History of the United States, vol. i., p. 412.

"Nothing could be more barbarous than this! To impose laws on men which in conscience they thought they could not comply with, to punish them for their noncompliance, and continually revile them as undutiful and disobedient subjects by reason thereof, and yet not permit them peaceably to depart and enjoy their own opinions in a distant part of the world, yet dependent on the sovereign: to do all this was base, barbarous, and inhuman. But persecutors of all ages and nations are near the same; they are without the feelings and the understandings of men. Cromwell or Hampden could have given little opposition to the measures of Charles in the wilds of North America. In England they engaged with spirit against him, and he had reason to repent his hindering their voyage. May such at all times be the reward of those who attempt to rule over their fellow-men with rigor: may they find that they will not be slaves to kings or priests, but that they know the rights by nature conferred on them, and will assert them! This will make princes cautious how they give themselves up to arbitrary counsels, and dread the consequences of them."—Harris's Life of Cromwell, p. 56.